What do you get when you mix a dollop of folk music, a dash of rap, several cups of rock ‘n’ roll and a room full of kids? A dance party with Dan Zanes and Friends, and that’s precisely the recipe that was served up to an enthusiastic Lied Center crowd Saturday morning.

If you don’t know about Dan Zanes, you probably aren’t around children much. The former frontman for the 1980s group the Del Fuegos, Zanes has turned his musical talents to the family music circuit, producing concerts, videos, books and music aimed at children and their parents.

Zanes’ philosophy of “letting out the music in us” has found a venue in “age-desegregated music,” and it truly is appealing to children and adults alike, in part because of Zanes’ personality, which is like a combination of Pete Seger, Paul McCartney and Mr. Rogers with a dash of Mick Jagger thrown in for good measure.

Make no mistake, Zanes is a talented musician, and he and longtime collaborators and bandmates Barbara Brousal, Cynthia Hopkins, Yoshi Waki and Colin Brooks honestly seem to want to share their talent, including others in the joy of music making. Describing his concerts as a ballyhoo, a hootenanny or a hullabaloo, Zanes walks on stage expecting and encouraging his audience to sing and dance along.

Dan Zanes, right, talks with his 10-year-old daughter, Anna. Zanes, a former rock star who has found a new career in family-friendly music, played Saturday in Lawrence.

Indeed, audience participation was in full swing Saturday. The area in front of the stage was a mosh pit of dancing children, but wriggling, swaying and singing was happening all over the auditorium as Zanes and Friends led the audience through “Jump Up and Dance Around,” “Water for the Elephants,” “Cape Cod Girls” and other sing-along tunes both old and new.

Zanes was joined on stage by Jeremy Shields of Tha Tribe playing an American Indian round dance song and local fiddlers Steve Mason, Mike Black and Dale Dryer-Black for spirited renditions of “Down by the Riverside” and “Flowers of Edinburgh” that had children leaping like crickets all over the room.

A highly anticipated and popular guest was Rankin Don, aka Father Goose, who came on stage to rap nursery rhymes and the ABCs and join in the group’s improvisational version of “Rattlin’ Bog” that had the audience howling with glee. (A Jayhawk, elephant, saxophone and wheat field all found themselves precariously perched in a “tree in a bog down in the valley-o.”)

The morning wouldn’t have been complete without the ultimate dance party number: “The Hokey Pokey.” Arms, legs, noses, etc., did the Hokey Pokey and turned themselves around all over the place, and not all of those appendages belonged to children. Zanes’ enthusiasm for music making is infectious; as he wandered out of the auditorium leading the audience in “East Side, West Side,” this Pied Piper from Brooklyn invited us all to experience the joy of music for music’s sake – and anything that brings children and the rest of us to that joy is worth the price of admission.

– Sarah Young is a lecturer in Kansas University’s English department. She can be reached at youngsl@ku.edu.